Gregor Kiczales has written another noteworthy piece on aspect oriented programming - this time an easy-to-read and convincing introduction to AOP and why you should start using it, too.

Software Development Online: Testing the Waters: "Testing the Waters
With new tools emerging and the buzz increasing, it’s time to start working with aspect-oriented programming. Here’s a plan for doing so, in four simple steps.
By Gregor Kiczales "

Enterprise PL/I V3.3 enables developers to leverage more than 30 years' worth of applications in new endeavors. This compiler gives you the needed PL/I function to begin to integrate both PL/I and Web-oriented business processes.

Notice the clever use of language - "leverage more than 30 years worh of applications"...

Well - I agree with Joel Spolsky that you should never rewrite code from scratch (great article, BTW!) ... but 30 year old code? It seems that IBM is certainly drinking that same cool-aid...

As people move to .NET I really hope they drink a sip from the refactoring tap, too. In fact, you could argue that one of the major USPs for .NET is that it provides a great way to extend legacy code using modern tools, languages and class-libraries. Just recompiling for the CLR is a major refactoring step in itself.

Sunday, October 12, 2003

It comes with a number of visual simulations of escape panic - some interesting lessons apply. For example, widening a corridor in a section reduces the overall flow compared to a straight corridor.

I believe there are some interesting parallels to here to road network design. For example, the article concludes that under certain conditions "faster is slower" - meaning that the faster people want to go in a crowd, the lower the average speed.

Maybe lowering the speed-limits during rush-our could increase the flow?

...of course, mountain-bikers should be exempt from this - our strategy for increasing flow is to expand the search space by relaxing constraints on where cyclists are supposed to go :-)